On Friday, Tester announced several changes to this bill, most of them against conservation. One of the changes was a guarantee of 10,000 acres cut per year and protection from “excessive” lawsuits. Another disturbing aspect is a “balance of harms” which forces a judge to consider short term damage and “long term damage of doing nothing”, whatever that means. Another change is moving the Highlands area near Butte from wilderness to “special management” so that the military can land helicopters there. Is all this worth 670,000 acres of new wilderness? This bill could become an example for all the national forests. We could be looking at mandated logging and a massive decrease of importance placed on science in the national forest system.

Folks, I’m going to be perfectly blunt; this is a very scary bill that sets a dangerous precedent for national forests.

Lots of talk about logging jobs and “losing forests to giant wildfires if loggers lose jobs” , etc. No talk on wilderness at all. Very, very telling. Mandated logging from congress? Frightening.

The wilderness nut in me wants to cheer for any bill that has wilderness. I am having a very hard time doing that here.

Check it out:

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Good news! What I love about this story is that a wild cat which supposedly no longer roams the Wyoming Range had everything to do with getting rid of those leases.

Payback is a bitch from the ghost cat. You may know them as “lynx”.

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Suldife mining one mile from the BWCAW boundary? No thanks.

Comments on the first draft Environmental Impact Statement on a sulfide mine proposal are due February 3, 2010.

Please come to an informational meeting on Thursday, January 21, 2010, at King of Kings Lutheran Church, 1583 Radio Drive, Woodbury, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m., to learn more.

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This would be the Buffalo Gap National Grassland, and the proposal is somewhere around 40,000 acres of wilderness! That is HUGE for a grassland, and would be a very welcome addition to a wilderness system that needs a bit more variety.

I was never really all that impressed with South Dakota until I started getting off the Interstate and spending some time there(I guess all those Wall Drug billboards made me hate the western part of the state more or less, as well as the tacky overindulgence of Sturgis). The western part of the state is beautiful and full of variety. I always thought of it as a place to just spend a day, but not anymore. There’s so much great stuff to see.

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